The Gettys​ were one of the richest families in the world, and Gavin Newsom’s father was their ‘consigliere’. In 1973, when John Paul Getty III was kidnapped by the Calabrian mafia, it fell to Bill Newsom to fly to Italy to get him back. At first he suspected that his godson – ‘Little Paul’, a trust fund kid locked out of his trust – might have staged his own abduction, but changed his mind when an Italian newspaper received Paul’s severed ear in the post. Bill helped put the ransom together: $2.9 million in cash, negotiated down from an initial demand of $17 million (eminently affordable, but why overpay?) and structured to be mostly tax-deductible. One of Gavin Newsom’s earliest memories is of riding in a car with Paul Getty to go Christmas shopping, under instructions not to mention the missing ear. He had a sense that ‘the Newsoms had been tied to the Gettys for a long time,’ even if he didn’t then understand how – he wondered if they were cousins. In his new memoir, he writes that his father, an aspiring writer turned lawyer, had ‘altered the course of his life to provide aid, counsel and comfort to the Gettys. When misfortune or scandal found one Getty scion or another, it was Bill Newsom, family consigliere, who flew off in one direction or another to the rescue.’ In return, the Gettys invested in his only son’s business ventures and backed his campaigns for mayor of San Francisco and governor of California. In Young Man in a Hurry, Newsom insists that though he grew up with the Gettys – sometimes living in their mansions and flying on their jet (the ‘Jetty’) – he was never one of them, and owes them no fealty.

Political memoirists are usually coy about their use of ghostwriters, but Newsom readily acknowledges that he couldn’t have written this book himself, and that the former Los Angeles Times reporter Mark Arax assembled it from interviews. Newsom’s dyslexia is so severe that he can’t deliver a typed speech, and he says he’s never been able to read a novel (non-fiction is a bit easier). He has learned to use a teleprompter – he finds its short, well-spaced lines easier to process – but an hour-long speech can still require a hundred hours of practice. All this put him at odds with his father, a great reader who named him after Gavin Maxwell, and he hasn’t entirely forgiven his mother for once telling him, when he was struggling with his schoolwork, ‘It’s OK to be average.’ She was probably trying to comfort him, but that’s not the way Newsom understood it: ‘I don’t recall crueller words ever said about me.’

Newsoms, he knew, were supposed to be illustrious. His great-grandfather was one of the founders of Bank of America. His grandfather William Newsom made a fortune in tract housing after the war (as did Donald Trump’s father), becoming a Democratic Party powerbroker (also like Trump’s father) and a patron of Pat Brown, the progressive governor of California. His mother’s side, he says, was no less accomplished, especially in botany and medicine, though she rarely spoke of her parents and never about her past. He now suspects that she had been deeply damaged by her father, a celebrated horticulturist who never recovered from his time in a Japanese prisoner of war camp. ‘My grandfather committed suicide,’ Newsom told the San Francisco Chronicle, ‘but not before putting his daughter – my mother – and her twin against the fireplace and saying he was going to blow their brains out.’ He now leans on his family history to justify what counts, in American terms, as an aggressive line on guns: he proposes a constitutional amendment that would raise the minimum age for purchasing a firearm from 18 to 21 while ‘leaving the Second Amendment unchanged and respecting America’s gun-owning tradition’.

Newsom’s parents divorced when he was young, which he attributes to political failure: his father ‘made the mistake of running for office not once but twice’, first for San Francisco supervisor and then for the California state senate. He lost both times, leaving him ashamed and in debt, and had a breakdown. Neither parent remarried, and on the campaign stump Newsom habitually invokes his mother’s struggles to raise him and his younger sister – low pay, long hours, constant stress – as proof of his connection to ordinary Americans. ‘Growing up, my mom juggled three jobs to keep a roof over our heads,’ he says. ‘Her example will live with me forever.’ She worked as an estate agent, a bookkeeper and a buyer for a department store, took in foster children and sometimes picked up waitressing shifts. By the time he was a teenager, they were living in a ‘Mediterranean Revival-style’ house in Marin County, across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco – it was large and grand, and, according to Zillow, is now worth about $3 million.

Nathan Heller wrote in the New Yorker that some of Newsom’s ‘former associates’ roll their eyes at his account of childhood privations – one described it as Newsom’s ‘I was born a poor Black child’ story, after the Steve Martin monologue in The Jerk. Newsom insists that his home life was straitened – he ate too much macaroni cheese on his own, and it made him anxious when his mother complained about money. At the same time, he knows the story is complicated: he also went on safari in Tanzania with the Gettys, guided by Mary Leakey; in a helicopter over Hudson Bay to watch polar bears; aboard yachts in the Mediterranean. Sometimes a ‘line of limousines’ would greet him, or a ‘pair of hot-air balloons’. His father had been friends with the Getty heirs since prep school, and they appointed him trustee of a fortune so large that the interest grew faster than it could be spent. Newsom remembers ‘crisp hundred-dollar bills’ being pressed into his hand, his wardrobe filling with ‘clothes appropriate to meet a king’, which he did, in Spain, at the Zarzuela Palace.

Newsom doesn’t pretend that frolicking with the Gettys awakened in him an early sensitivity to inequality or the unfairness of the American tax code. He seems to have been a personable jock, taking luxury as it came. His main interests were playing baseball and basketball – schoolwork felt impossible, but at least the cheerleaders at Redwood High would yell: ‘Dippity-do, dippity-do! Gavin, Gavin, we love you!’ The only foreshadowing of his political career seems to have been a propensity for theatrical self-fashioning. He’d learned from his mother that identity was, to some extent, elective – after all, she spoke with a ‘cut-glass English accent’ despite being entirely Californian. (She picked it up after watching Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady.) After seeing Pierce Brosnan play a proto-Bond in the TV show Remington Steele, Newsom became ‘obsessed with Steele’ – so confident, so smooth – and started to copy his mannerisms, ‘the wrinkling of his brow being the first’, becoming the only kid at school who wore a suit. He doesn’t mention his later fixation with the predatory, greed-is-good Gordon Gekko in Wall Street, but on a recent podcast his sister suggested it was the inspiration for his shellacked-back hair.

Newsom says baseball got him into Santa Clara University – he doesn’t say that, as the New York Times reported, his application was probably pushed through by two of his father’s friends, the California governor Jerry Brown and a member of the university’s board of regents. After college, living rent-free in the Getty compound in San Francisco, his grades too poor for law school, he went into the wine business. Backed by the Gettys, he started a chain of shops and restaurants called PlumpJack, in honour of an opera Gordon Getty had written about Falstaff. He describes its aim as nothing less than the ‘democratisation of fine wines’ – Wine Spectator noted that he’d ‘challenged conventional wisdom by putting a screw top on a $135 bottle of Napa Cabernet’. PlumpJack grew to include hotels and a nightclub. It made Newsom rich. (The Getty trust also paid him for ‘investment advice’.) But was it enough? He had become friendly with another of his father’s associates, the San Francisco mayor Willie Brown – they’d flown together on the Getty jet. Nothing in the memoir suggests that Newsom had taken any interest in public policy until the mayor put him on the city’s Parking and Traffic Commission, and he was surprised by how much he enjoyed it. There’s a real sweetness, and only the hint of condescension, in his account of trying to bolster the morale of traffic wardens. When he began considering a career in politics, what sealed the deal was his father’s approval: he’d never quite been able to get it before. At the prospect of a Newsom finally winning elected office, his father ‘literally glowed with pride’.

Newsom describes himself as an ‘accidental politician’. Mayor Brown anointed him as his preferred successor, though the decisive factor was probably his ability to outspend his rivals by several million dollars. When Newsom became mayor of San Francisco at the beginning of 2004, he was 36 – the youngest in more than a century and an instant Democratic celebrity. He was ‘Mayor McHottie’, with a new and no less glamorous wife: Kimberly Guilfoyle, then a prosecutor and TV court reporter, before the political and surgical transformations that would accompany her rise through Fox News and into Trumpworld. (She spent several years as Donald Trump Jr’s fiancée; after their break-up in 2024, she was made ambassador to Greece.) Newsom is strikingly careful when he talks about her. In the memoir he praises her beauty and intelligence, while quoting his sister’s view that her ‘need for attention and love could not be met’.

Brown​ once described the mayor’s job as ‘streetlights, dog do and parking meters’. Newsom took a grander view. Within weeks of taking office, he ordered the city clerk to begin issuing marriage licences to same-sex couples, in defiance of state law. He describes it as an impulsive act – he had been shaken by George W. Bush’s State of the Union address, in which the president spoke in defence of the ‘sanctity of marriage’. In that moment, Newsom says, he grasped what it meant to represent San Francisco: his constituents were under attack. He knew that Democrats were supposed to favour incremental progress and consensus-building, not to disregard the law or to embrace unchecked executive power. But what if they didn’t? Newsom writes, with evident pride, that he became such an embarrassment to party leaders that he wasn’t permitted to address the Democratic National Convention that year, where Barack Obama ‘kept a mile’s distance between himself and me’. In what became known as the Winter of Love, the city issued around four thousand marriage licences before the state supreme court intervened in March: the marriages were all annulled, but Newsom argues that he shifted public opinion, widened the Overton window. Couples from all over the country had converged on San Francisco to ‘consecrate on paper what they had consecrated with their lives’; ‘a beautiful little girl’ had tugged at his jacket to thank him for giving her two mommies. Americans finally had an opportunity to see what gay marriage looked like: ordinary joy, no collapse of the heavens.

When Newsom looks back on that moment in speeches and interviews, it’s usually to make the point that he can stand up for people, make hard choices, ‘fight fire with fire’. Yet the memoir is more equivocal. He seems to have taken seriously criticism from the gay congressman Barney Frank, who called him a ‘naive attention seeker’ and argued that he should have followed the less flashy model of working to change the law. He also recognises – how could he not? – that the backlash was severe, culminating in Proposition 8, a California ballot measure that banned same-sex marriage until 2013. Senator Dianne Feinstein later argued that Newsom had played into the Republicans’ hands by acting this way in an election year: the spectre of gay marriage mobilised their base. Newsom sometimes used to open speeches by saying: ‘My name is Gavin Newsom and I helped elect George Bush’ – a joke, but not a funny one.

Whatever the rest of the country thought, the Winter of Love made Newsom a hero in San Francisco. His admission that he’d had an affair with his appointments secretary – the wife of his deputy chief of staff, one of his closest friends – did little to set him back. (Newsom was still married to Guilfoyle at the time, but they had separated.) Once his marriage collapsed, he says, he ‘proceeded to plunge into my second act of bachelorhood, which I did not handle with discernment’, a euphemism for dating a 19-year-old. He has now been married to his age-appropriate current wife – the documentary filmmaker Jennifer Siebel Newsom – for eighteen years, scandal-free, and they have four children. In 2011 he was elected lieutenant governor of California, which he has denigrated as a ‘largely ceremonial post’ and ‘backwater’. Jerry Brown had no interest in ceding power. Newsom was frustrated not to have a portfolio, and sometimes humiliated: in 2013, the Los Angeles Times reported that ‘you could say that Governor Jerry Brown treats Lieutenant Governor Newsom like a dog. But that wouldn’t be accurate,’ since the governor’s dog at least ‘regularly walks with gubernatorial aides in Capitol Park. Newsom essentially gets locked out.’ He put up with it for eight years, in anticipation of eventually becoming governor himself. Yet nowhere in the memoir does he articulate why he wanted the job. Why not a senator, or something else entirely? The ambition is treated as self-evident: if the office is attainable, why wouldn’t you want it?

When Brown finally retired in 2019, Newsom had been openly campaigning to succeed him for almost four years. But the long runway helped: it’s a huge state, and voters tended to like him when they met him. California Democrats skew progressive, and so did his platform: universal healthcare, clean energy, gun control, criminal justice reform and a ‘Marshall Plan for affordable housing’. He won the election just before his father died, summoning his ‘last bit of life force to see his only son become the fortieth governor of the state he loved so much’. The memoir ends there, all potential energy, before the inevitable compromises and disappointments of governing. An early ending also allows him to leave out the French Laundry debacle in 2020, when despite Covid stay-at-home orders Newsom was photographed attending a lobbyist’s birthday dinner at the inordinately expensive restaurant in the Napa Valley. He survived – unlike Boris Johnson – by apologising as soon as the story broke, attacking himself for recklessness and hypocrisy before others could do it for him. When Republicans tried to recall him from office, he shrewdly reframed the effort as a referendum on Trump and Covid denialism.

After seven years as governor, Newsom no longer promises to bring single-payer healthcare to California, or a Marshall Plan for housing. When asked about what he hasn’t done, he becomes defensive: ‘I’d rather be accused of [having] those audacious stretch goals than be accused of timidity.’ He insists that housing is ‘a stubborn issue. You can’t snap your fingers and build hundreds of thousands, millions of housing units overnight.’ He speaks increasingly of the need for fiscal discipline, and says that Democrats need to become ‘more culturally normal’ and ‘less prone to spending a disproportionate amount of time on pronouns, identity politics’. Last year he startled allies by saying that it was ‘deeply unfair’ for trans women to compete in women’s sports. (His reputation nationally has yet to catch up. On a recent episode of Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show, a Newsom impersonator – teeth too white, face too tanned – rode in on a skateboard: ‘I just came from a ribbon-cutting sesh at a shelter for non-binary chihuahuas.’)

The conventional wisdom is that ever since Newsom became governor, he’s been tacking to the centre in anticipation of a presidential campaign; while sections of the Democratic Party might flirt with a more progressive candidate, it always nominates a moderate. Newsom is almost certainly running, though he’s yet to declare. His claim to the office will be the state of California itself, which he argues he’s made better, richer, stronger. He likes to ask: ‘If California is a failed state, why are four of the seven most valuable companies in the world based here? Why does the Bay Area remain the top-ranked region for venture capital,’ with more ‘unicorns’ – billion-dollar start-ups – than anywhere else? He says that California succeeds because it ‘embraces innovation’, hence his wariness to overtax or to over-regulate Silicon Valley. (He opposes the ballot initiative to levy a one-time tax on the state’s billionaires.) ‘No other place offers opportunity to so many from such diverse backgrounds.’ But he’ll have to confront the counter-narrative: to many Americans, California no longer seems like a good place to live. The median price of a home hovers around $850,000 – nearly $100,000 higher than the next most expensive state, Hawaii. Although Newsom entered office promising to tackle homelessness, more Californians are unhoused now than when he was elected. In 2008 voters approved $10 billion in state bonds for a high-speed rail network – the federal government added billions more – and still, no rail. Californians are leaving the state faster than others are moving in, remaking their lives in Texas and Arizona. The Los Angeles Times recently reported that the Governor’s Office of Business and Economic Development plans to spend $19 million to boost the state’s image – Newsom’s team calls this a boon for local businesses, though the greatest beneficiary seems likely to be the governor himself.

Newsom is betting that what the Democrats most want is a fighter, and so he’s erected billboards in red states: ‘Need an abortion? California is ready to help.’ He needles Trump on Truth Social and X, and his website sells kneepads ‘for all your grovelling to Trump needs – now in Republican red’. When he calls Stephen Miller a ‘cuck’, or suggests that the president wears adult diapers, he insists he’s merely holding up a mirror to the prevailing madness. He’s arguably done more than any other Democrat to boost his party’s chances in the upcoming midterms. Liberals were initially uneasy when he suggested redrawing California’s congressional maps – isn’t gerrymandering supposed to be wrong? – but came around when it became clear that it might be the only way to regain control of the House. But that’s probably not the reason betting markets are predicting Newsom will be the next Democratic nominee, even as Kamala Harris leads in the polls. As the Democratic congresswoman Jasmine Crockett says, the party is keen to coalesce around the ‘safest white boy we can find’. Unlike Harris, or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Cory Booker, Pete Buttigieg, J.B. Pritzker, Gretchen Whitmer, Jon Ossoff and Josh Shapiro, he’s a straight white man who goes to church at Christmas. Who else is there? Remington Steele for president.